Sometimes I have a feeling that computers aren’t that stupid. They know things. Here is a fresh example.
My office workstation started misbehaving. During the last few days it got to alsmost unbearable. It hangs every 20 minutes or so. I did all the troubleshooting and debugging and everything looks OK. I’ve monitored the motherboard and CPU temperatures – neither ever got above +34C. I ran a bunch of tests on the memory – everything is good. I checked both harddisks for bad blocks – none found. I removed all unused hardware and drivers. I have changed drivers for my video card, which is a normal NVidia GeForce MX 32. I did nothing fancy with the PC.
Still, about every 20-30 minutes it would hang totally dead. I got bored with the situation and ordered a replacement. One was going to happen sooner or later anyway, since my current workstation is pretty old.
We all know what jealosy is, don’t we? Well, guess what happened. The very next day after my purchase order was approved, I come to the office, login, and my workstation crashes on me. I reboot it as usual, but it refuses to come up. I get a kernel oops. And a one I haven’t ever seen before. Yey! I boot with the rescue CD and realize that my root filesystem is terribly broken. Coincidence? I think not.
fsck.ext3 was running for more than two hours trying to repair everything. But that didn’t help. The machine is coming up to some really strange state – it does not load any services on the startup an proceeds directly to the login screen. It does not allow in noone, even local root. Plenty of errors are getting dumped on the console about missing shared libraries and stuff like that.
In about one hour I’ll be out of ideas…
P.S.: I’ve mentioned the Murphy’s Law recently. Well, it struck again. Our backup library died a few days ago and we are in the process of replacing it. So even if there is any fresh backup of my computer, I can’t restore it at the moment. Cool!